Purposeful Plastics

Purposeful Plastics

Since our founding in 1996, Preserve has sought to offer a new way of thinking about the everyday products we use. After all, products are more than just products. They have implications and effects far beyond the box or bag they come in. Each one carries a cost. Preserve offers better products—ones that look good, do their job well and require no compromise from our customers or our planet.

Plastics have radically transformed the kinds of products available for use in our daily lives, from cars to cell phones to cups to candy wrappers—but they’re also curious and sometimes confusing materials. From our first days as a company, we have used only recycled plastic to make our Preserve products. We use plastic because it is a widely available and useful material. And more importantly, by using only recycled plastics, we keep them from piling up in landfills, we save resources like energy and water, and we reduce carbon emissions and other impacts.

Plastics are coded with numbers 1-7, not to categorize which plastics are more or less benign or recyclable, but simply to differentiate them.

To date, we’ve used only one kind of plastic in Preserve products—recycled #5 polypropylene. We use this material because we have confidence in its performance, health and safety. As concerns over the health and safety of plastics have mounted, we have taken steps to scrutinize our choice to use recycled #5 polypropylene plastic in our products and have conducted tests to ensure the safety of this material.

#5 polypropylene is a benign plastic and does not leach any chemicals. However all plastics are not created equal. Some plastics contain chemicals that can be harmful to humans if ingested. Some additives in plastics, such as BPA, are increasingly being shown to have interactions with the body’s hormone system (specifically, the endocrine system).

While our plastics do not contain harmful additives, we follow the scientific research and debate closely, and hold the precautionary principle as our goal. For this reason, we don’t allow any possible endocrine disrupters into our plastics. Furthermore, we’ve refined our systems to source and produce all of our Preserve plastics from recycled products and packaging materials that have never had these chemicals introduced to them.

The effects of plastics on humans can depend on the ways in which the plastics are used. For example, most plastics begin to degrade when exposed to heat, which means additives and monomers are more likely to leach out of the plastics and/or potentially combine with other chemicals in the environment. Dishwashers, for example, apply a low level of heat for a long duration, which can cause this kind of degradation. For this reason, we’ve made sure that all Preserve plastics are dishwasher-safe.

Recycled plastics offer a variety of benefits. They decrease waste sent to landfills, reduce use of non-renewable resources, like natural gas and oil, decrease energy use and decrease emissions of carbon dioxide. Because of all this, Preserve products are better for the Earth—and, because of the care we take in selecting and testing the materials we use, we ensure that Preserve products are free of BPA and are safe for use by your families and ours.

As part of our mission as a company, we strive to increase the day-to-day smart choices we all make that benefit the environment. One way we do that is by increasing the demand for recycled materials. Another way we do it is by providing opportunities and incentives to easily recycle our products when you’re finished with them. To learn how to recycle your Preserve products, visit our Gimme 5 page.